St. Petersburg

1:00am in St. Petersburg

After Moscow we made a short trip to Petersburg before leaving Russia with a few hours left on our visa.
We travelled on the very comfortable overnight train from Moscow, arriving at 7am, went to our accommodation then headed out sightseeing. By the next evening we were on a train to Helsinki.
I've never much liked Peter, as the Russians call the city, and this time wasn't any different. This is slightly paradoxical, as the people were very friendly and there were much nicer places for food and drink; but the city itself is entirely fake, created by Peter the Great in the early 1700s on a personal whim, intended to 'Europeanise' Russian society and designed by mostly Italian architects in the grand, rational, Neoclassical style of the Enlightenment, on a thinly-populated swampy coastal area, so, conceptually at least, it's a kind of combination of Canberra and Darwin.
I much prefer the more organic and Russian city of Moscow - and indeed the other parts of Russia! Petersburg is a Russian oddity, almost not a part of Russia, but loved by many Russians (and foreigners) as a 'beautiful' city and a city of culture.
I was also, by this time, tired of travel and grabbing (or trying to grab) the essence of a place in two or three days, so I was not in the most open frame of mind! - and it was cold, colder even than Moscow, which had been in the grip of an unseasonal cold snap.
So, that was St. Petersburg!

Arriving in St. Petersburg's Moscovski vokzal

St. Petersburg also has an impressive (if not quite as flabbergasting as Moscow's!) Metro system

... also with intricate art depicting the heroic labour of the people

St. Petersburg grandeur

The entrance to Dvortsovaya Ploshchad(Palace square)

Palace square

Kazan cathedral

A typical Petersburg canal

There is the odd Soviet building in the centre, this one with typically heroic themed art at the top

White nights. We were lucky enough to be in St. Petersburg during the famous белые ночи or 'white nights', when the sun barely sets. This, under a heavily clouded sky, is 1:00am

The Ballet

We attended a performance of The Little Humpbacked Horse at the
Mariinsky theatre II

Farewell Russia!

Departure board at the Finlandski vokzal
Our train, the Finnish railways Allegro, taking 3 1/2 hours to Helsinki

Last glimpses of Russia...